Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Friday April 20, 2007 @02:16AM
from the cashing-out-in-banana-chips dept.

marct22 writes "Stephen J Dubner, co-writer of 'Freakonomics' said there will be a second Freakonomics book. One of the items that will be covered is capuchin monkeys' use of washers as money, buying sweets, budgeting for favored treats over lesser treats. He mentioned that one of the experiments had similar outcomes as a study of day traders. And lastly, he watched capuchin prostitution!"

I concur. Freakonomics stripped a bit too much of the science away in an attempt to make the book accessible.Naked Economics [amazon.com] tries to do the same thing as Freakonomics, but achieves a much higher degree of success. Freakonomics was dumbed down to an almost insulting level, and many of the examples provided felt somewhat outlandish. Naked Economics does a much better job of distilling economic theory down to plain english, and picks much more relevant examples. I also found it to be a pretty entertainin

From the descriptions on Amazon, it seems like Naked Economics tries to be something completely different than Freakonomics. The entire point of Freakonomics is applying economic theory to areas economists don't usually look at, and describe some of the more interesting results in an entertaining and accessible way, not to be an economy textbook. You say it was "dumbed down" - I say it was written with a specific audience in mind: People who are not interested in economics, i.e. most of us, but who might find a description of some of the results of applying economic theory to everyday situations interesting and entertaining.

It never spends much space on economic theory, even "distilled to plain English", because that isn't the purpose of the book.

The book is full of half-answered questions, followed by sweeping generalizations. The irony is that the authors criticize "expertise" constantly (such as in the real-estate agent case), but then turn around and make sweeping statements that depend on their own status as experts.

My local expert (a fellow with a Ph.D. in economics) has a similar opinion, and doesn't really consider anything in it particularly insightful to begin with.

You underestimate the tenaciousness of determined/. posters!Your statement implicitly asserts that to buy this book is to undermine your position as a "thinker". The more proper statement might be as follows:

Reading this book is not likely to stimulate the mind of a self-proclaimed thinker in any manner, let alone a pleasing one.

Or, if that is too long for you.

The worth of this book to someone who enjoys thinking is probably nil.

Those statements combine exception handling and a clear indication the book is

Speaking as someone who actually did econometrics and hard math/statistics economics in school, I could not agree more with this critique of Freakonomics. It is an entertaining read, to be sure, but he's omitted a lot of the data to support his conclusions, making it more of a "just believe me" book than an actual primer to non-traditional economics.

I don't recall so much of the "letters from our website", but I do recall being seriously disappointed with this book. For starters, it's very short. I know, that may not sound like a bad thing, but it is representative of a lack of detail. They cover several topics that I thought had the potential to be really interesting, but for the most part they cover them with a "studies have shown" or "we were able to show" or similar statements. They didn't really go into any of the details of their analysis of

I find it interesting how monkeys can be compared to day traders. I think to goes to show how similar us humans really are to other animals. In many ways we're more a fortunate combination of traits than having truly unique traits.

"I think it simply goes to show how similar day traders are to monkeys.""He also devised two games that showed monkeys could end up feeling as if they'd won or lost, even though they'd actually broken even. Their seemingly irrational preference for the "winning" game had Chen questioning how useful the monkeys would be as a touchstone for studying human behavior. Then he found that a similar study of day traders conducted by another researcher resulted in the same psychological preference. Even when they ca

Or maybe, it just shows that you can compare anything to anything, if you carefully choose only the aspects that sorta superficially support your idea, do a lot of sophistry to make them look even more supportive, and keep your fingers crossed that noone notices all else you've ignored.

Let me tell you a joke: "A researcher puts a flea on a piece of paper and yells, "JUMP!" The startled flea jumps. The researcher cuts off the flea's legs, puts it back on the piece of paper, and yells, "JUMP!" The flea doesn't jump. The researcher notes, "Fleas hear with their legs. A flea whose legs have been cut off can't hear any more.""

Or here, let me offer definitive proof that cats are nerds, or at least nerds act just like cats. Cats:

- are naturally attracted to books and keyboards. Mine always used to come curl up on the book I was reading.

- aren't very social, and don't deal well with extended periods of social interaction. (Keep petting one too long after it signalled "I've had enough," and it might just scratch.) They also actually need periods of being alone or left alone. Also, bringing a new cat home might just result in a fight over who's alpha, instead of, "hi, welcome to the team."

- except for a few modified/selected races, only "talk" when they actually have something to say and/or when all else failed. (See the widespread myth that meowing is somehow only for communicating with humans.) They're also not good at telling you what they want or why. How introverted is that?

- have a problem with authority and obeying orders. (See, "herding cats.")

- have unbalanced diets, by human standard, and would rather not eat their veggies

- have weird sleep schedules, by human standards.

- like it warm. I can just see a cat coming to the office in mountain boots and a sweater in July, if it were anthropomorphic.

- really dislike being stuffed in a suit and tie.

- really don't like showering, or being given a shower. Actually, "loathe" just about starts to describe it.

- play (with) all sorts of stuff that makes no sense for a normal human.

- never discovered complex courting rituals.

Etc. There you go. I've proven beyond all doubt that nerds act just like cats. Funny how similar we are to animals, eh?

In practice it just shows how easy it is to find _some_ animal that matches whatever you want to match, if you just look hard enough and ignore what is _really_ happening there. E.g., I've thoroughly ignored the fact that a nerd surviving on say, chocolate or pizza/chinese food only, is doing it because of taste preferences or being too lazy for anything else, while a cat is actually biologically made to be a meat-only eater. ("Obligate carnivore.") E.g., I've thoroughly ignored the fact that a cat's attraction to books isn't because it actually wants to read, and to your keyboard isn't because it wants to program. Etc.

To get back to the topic, yeah, you can compare anything from the real economy to a monkey play-economy, but it's just material to make Joe Sixpack feel better about his not understanding the real economy. Day trading especially is a complex phenomenon, including such aspects as being, basically, a form of gambling. I.e., when you see monkeys playing cards/dice/3-cups/whatever, then you'll have an essential ingredient in it. Sure, you can look at it superficially being just like monkeys and bottle caps changing hands, but that's the kind of superficial over-simplification that's outright useless except maybe as an emotional metaphor.

Humans thrive on metaphor and symbols. In fact we are the only species on the planet that can create, manipulate, fuse, and synthesize in everything we do. Perhaps it is true that some metaphors are more useful than others, but metaphors more often than not help people understand. The proof? Look at the continued success of poems; Are these essential to human development? Many would argue yes.

Humans are a fickle species. We demand to be entertained, humored, amused. Perhaps its our irrational emotions tak

Yes, but, see, the trick is to know when it's just a funny metaphor which shouldn't be taken seriously. Nothing against the human species coming up with entertaining metaphors, similes and other figures of speech, but the trick is to know that that's not, in fact, an accurate model of reality.Yes, if we couldn't dream, fantasize, whatever, we'd probably be less successful than snails. But equally if we took all phantasies to seriously, we'd be even less successful. The trick is to _not_ jump off the house j

Honestly you simply are stereotyping cats. And you are being silly for the sake of making a joke but I have to correct you.a cat does not inherently act that way, humans promote that behaivoir in them. I have had 5 cats in my lifetime as well as trained 4 more for friends because of how cats act from my rearing.

Cats if raised correctly will tolerate anything and can learn that humans are harmless and will not hurt me. Instilling this fact (you can even instill this fact into the cats mind of a dog if you

Honestly you simply are stereotyping cats. And you are being silly for the sake of making a joke but I have to correct you.

Very much so. It was _supposed_ to be a thoroughly silly illustration of anthropomorphising animals, and anthropomorphising all wrong at that, to make fun of people who do that to draw some conclusions about human behaviour.

So I'm not going to disaggree with your corrections there. E.g., yes, I know what they really wanted when they curled up on my book. Very much so.

Or maybe, it just shows that you can compare anything to anything, if you carefully choose only the aspects that sorta superficially support your idea, do a lot of sophistry to make them look even more supportive, and keep your fingers crossed that noone notices all else you've ignored.

Allow me to start by mentioning my bias, I liked the book, took classes from Steve Levitt, and worked for him for a while during and after college. It may help to know that those gimmicky "comparisons" really were not a part of Levitt's academic papers [uchicago.edu] which the book is based on. Here's a bit of background on Freakonomics, basically Levitt writes a ton of clever papers that win him some recognition. Dubner took these papers and simplified them to try and make them accessible to the non-economic public. Sure, stylistically, there's issues that I have with it as well (and these are issues I have with virtually every pop-science book out there). But I feel as if you've belittled the book's content based on some style choices designed to draw the reader in.

Perhaps I've misunderstood your point, but gimmicky comparisons aside, there's a lot of well thought out content to that book that shouldn't be outright dismissed or characterized badly due to some tasteless introductory paragraphs.

Depends how you define "profession", I suppose. It does suggest that prostitution seems to develop pretty quickly after the conceptual introduction of the idea of "trade", and perhaps some medium of exchange. The more abstract "trader" is likely to predate it, since the conceptual leap of trading something desirable for something desirable in a different manner is not required; trading grapes for bananas or some suchmay have come first. However, Prostitutio

I remember watching this video about the sexual life of Bonobo apes (cousins of chimpanzee with a social life very similar to humans in many respects, in particular sex). One funny part was a young male coming to a female resting on a branch with a banana. The males makes it very clear what he wants in exchange, they do the deed and the the female eats the banana after he leaves. The funny part is that in the commentary they explain that this specific female never goes looking for food...

Sounds to me like the poor guy was bringing his girlfriend gifts and/or taking her out to lunch to get any action. If the bonobos were any more evolved, they'd probably have also seen him taking her to a movie;)

An even funnier clip I saw had the male bonobo minding his own business, eating a bunch of bananas. A female comes over to him, rolls over and spreads her legs. You could clearly see the male thinking, "Uh, okay, sure!" He drops the bananas, is all ready to get it on, and the female gets up and steals the bananas. The male is left with no bananas and a raging hard-on.

How can they use washers as money? I assume they're the normal kind made of base metal (not silver or gold) so anybody could mine some more zinc or steel and make more of them. Where's the intrinsic value? It's just another fiat currency like dollars except in this case the 'the man' is the zookeeper.

and I've taken economics in college, but the kinda freakonomics people should hear more about (and do something about) is how the top 1% of the American population controls 95% of the wealth. Between 1979 and 1997, income for the middle class rose 9%m while income for the top 1% rose 140%! Now that's freaky [nader.org]!

Those transnational conglomerates didn't make their fortunes by sitting in a room and saying "let's keep people pacified and preoccupied", they did it by sitting in a room and saying "let's figure out what news and entertainment people will take time to read or watch, thus attracting a valuable demographic and increasing our advertising rates". The way to be a profitable news outlet is to be a popular news outlet.There are segments of the population that are very interested in economic issues, and as a re

How about restoring highly regressive tax rates on stratospheric tax brackets, as well as the inheritance tax, closing loopholes allowing people to offshore their wealth, and funding the IRS to enforce the laws.

Check out the top tax brackets from the 50s and 60s (a time of great economic growth) sometime.

Lucky little bastages. I wish I could toss my wife some washers or food for some service. He needs to do experiments to see if a metal band around a Capuchin's ring finger stops the process of copulation. The males will give the females all of the washers and food, and the females will in turn become celibate or have intercourse with different monkeys.

One of the items that will be covered is capuchin monkeys' use of washers as money, buying sweets, budgeting for favored treats over lesser treats. He mentioned that one of the experiments had similar outcomes as a study of day traders. And lastly, he watched capuchin prostitution!

The NY Times article on that study, from 2005, can be found here [nytimes.com].

Thanks. And it's suspicious. With regards to the prostitution incident, the article freely admits that they didn't even try to reproduce it. And their excuse was, "it wouldn't reflect well on anyone involved if the money turned the lab into a brothel."

That may well be so, but that sorta misses the point that it's useless to compare a human to an animal that has been _trained_ to do something, as a way to draw conclusions about the human. E.g., sure, you can train a gorilla to understand sign language, and it sure says something about its intelligence. But then you can't go and write a book on the premise that, basically, "hey, what mutes do is exactly the same sign language as these gorillas are using! Mutes are just like gorillas!"

Basically it's bullshit to then compare a community of gorillas arificially _trained_ to do X to a community of humans who have a rationale behind doing X, as if there were no difference there. Whatever X may be.

In this case, "monkeys using washers/caps/whatever as money" conjures an image that is thoroughly misleading. It's not like those monkeys just saw a heap of washers and went, "I know, let's use those as money". They were _trained_ and coaxed to play a game they don't even understand.

Money was a hard concept to figure out even for humans. It took tens of thousands of years to figure that one out. Even if you look at the economy of, say, the Old Kingdom (an ancient Egypt period), it was based on barter. If you had some extra grain (e.g., you were a farmer) and wanted a pot, you'd go to the potter and ask, basically, "how much grain do you want for that pot?" Then the potter wanted a knife and went to the smith and asked, "can I trade you some pottery for a knife? What if I gave you some of this grain I earned too?" And so on.

Discovering money wasn't just an accidental seeing a round piece of metal and going, "oh, you know, we could use a bunch of those as money." It was a long and rocky road in itself, for example, discovering first the artificial value of jewellery and other rare luxuries. Then the fact that a golden chalice could be stored longer than a ton of grain, which would eventually rot. And only then the money wasn't just some rounded bits that could be traded, but a standardized quantity of such a valuable, non-decaying metal.

E.g., the value of the Roman Solidus, wasn't just being a round piece like a washer, but being a standardized quantity of gold. There wasn't some arbitrary assigned value to it, like when playing with washers or Monopoly money, the value was the exact value of the 4.5g of gold in it. Two pounds of Solidi weren't just an arbitrary value multiplied by the number of coins, it was the exact value of two pounds of gold.

Floating paper money with floating values are a _very_ recent invention, and it took lots of growing pains to wrap the human mind around _that_ notion. It took first assigning a value in gold, and getting people to believe that they can actually go and redeem a 100$ note for 100$ worth of gold. I.e., the value was _still_ tied to the idea of having an inherent value. It took a Great Depression to finally decouple money from an intrinsic value in precious metals, and some people _still_ can't really wrap their mind around it.

That was, in a nutshell, 40000 years after humans got out of Africa. Yep, 40k years. That's how long it took humans to arrive at the modern concept of money as just tokens.

So it's silly to believe that a bunch of monkeys would just see a bunch of worthless (for them) washers and immediately come up with the exact same concept. "Hey, we'll use these as tokens whose value is dictated by supply and demand." Nope, sorry, it's just not going to happen.

What you can have is monkeys _trained_ to play with washers in a mockery of an economy. We don't even know how much they understand there, and how much is mindless imitation and "pavlov's dog" kinda reflexes.

E.g., did someone actually figure out prostitution in all its human implications? Or more likely, a bunch of monkeys trained to give tokens to the researcher on all occasions, e.g., when they're fed, started also giving tokens as a reflex to anyone, including to the female they're mating with?

Still, the analogy holds. Since we too are "trained" to see money as money. Do you really think a lot of people put any thought into the development of money and currency? No, they are trained that they get goods for their greenbacks, and that they may accept those green bills for their stuff 'cause there's someone else who's gonna give them other items for them.

People don't see that development, the money-for-gold of the old days. They see the essentially worthless token that becomes valuable because everyone around them deems it just as valuable. They don't care about how international trade influences inflation and how the Dollar stands towards the Euro or Yen, they know that prices go up or wages go down, but the why and how completely escapes them.

So generally, most people are just at the level of those monkeys. They know that if they perform some tricks (i.e. work), they will get some tokens (a paycheck) and they can redeem them for sweets (or a new computer). And that's it.

When you look at the bottom of it all, you'll see that many people are just that: Trained monkeys.

As usual with such issues, the answer is: yes and no. Depends what you're looking at and at what level.Yes, you can say that many individual humans are not much better than trained monkeys. But that's a different topic.

No, IMHO, you can't compare:

A) a human behaviour that evolved over 40,000 years, and based on concepts refined and formalized over all that time, to

B) a monkey behaviour that exists only because someone trained them to do that.

You're right, but IMHO, that just tells me that the monkeys and us are not so different. They haven'thad to evolve that behaviour, but they're capable of implementing it. It suggests that monkeys would be capable of arriving at a society similar to ours, given enough time and environmental pressure to do so (including specialization, see the post about the female bonobo monkey).

So you're saying that someone studied and explained the behavior of day traders and formalized a theory about how they behaved. Now that there is an explanation the behavior has been modified? The traders are no longer acting like trained monkeys?

Wouldn't it make more sense to explain the monkeys' behaviour with the same theories as used for the day traders?

Erh, I hope you don't want to claim that our system of trade somehow "evolved" into our genetic makeup. That would be, quite bluntly, bullcrap. Trading and the 'value of money' is a learned practice that we do of course pass on to the next generation, since they can't exist in our world without the knowledge of money and property in the first place, but it's no less a learned behaviour than stopping at a red light. It's not something ingrained in our brains and rooted so deeply that we simply feel compelled

Even if you view humans as trained monkey, it's really comparing:
A) a human trained humans to do X, vs
B) a human trained monkeys to do X.

First, there's another remark which notes the observation of prostitution in bonobos, without the human introduction of economic concepts. Second, there were several behaviors (like the scramble for washers and prostitution) that the researchers did not train for, but emerged as a logical consequence of the introduction of the concept of "money". And third, your

Most people don't understand money either. They're just passing around tokens the way they've been trained by their parents and others around them.

Washers and monopoly money aren't worth much because not enough people believe they are worth something.

What it takes is belief.

If the belief in the US Dollar's value weakened, it will fall in value. If it dropped enough you might have to give a million of them to perfect strangers just to buy loaves of bread, or a virtual sword in an MMOG.

Most people do not make buying decisions the way you claim they do. Only a few would do "this will save me X hours, but does it cost more than I make in X hours". Maybe even more people would go "Shiny! Let's buy it" than do what you say (looking at how advertising works;) ).

See "The Psychology of Spending": http://web.mit.edu/giving/spectrum/winter99/spendi ng.html

Pessimistic?The US dollar is not gold backed, but it doesn't have to be as long as everyone uses the US dollar for trade - the Feds can keep printing money (either by actually printing money or with "IOU"s) and things still "kinda work" (there's so much USD in circulation and 66% of it is held outside the USA, so it's not devalued as fast). The problem is if more and more start shifting to other currencies like the Euro. In 2002/2003 EUR25 and USD25 would get you 1 barrel of oil. In 2006 it was USD70 vs EUR

So you are saying you emerged from the womb with complete understanding of language, mathematics, and cause-effect association? When you were a child, did you have a clear rationale explaining why you were being taught how to divide or expand your vocabulary? I think you were sent to school where you received exposure to these and other concepts repeatedly until you began accurately repeating them to your instructors. Eventually you learned how to independently form sophisticated compositions of those si

Human pick up language naturally, without being explicitly taught. All humans (without a severe neurological disorder) do this automatically and are fluent to a nearly-adult level by the age of 5, without instruction. Yes, it is common in Western societies to "teach" kids new vocabulary, but there are cultures where this is not done. Also, correcting 2-5 year olds' grammar generally has no effect on their usage - they're just going to make certain mistakes until they get to the right stage, and then they'll

"...the point that it's useless to compare a human to an animal that has been _trained_ to do something..."

I agree with your point but lets not forget that humans are also "trained", the only part that is "instinctive learned" is language, writing, maths, farming, building, ect, are all taught. Our unmatched ability to manipulate symbols means thousands of generations of "trainning" can be condensed into a text book, or a comprehensive model of the known universe in a handfull of equations and a periodic

So it's silly to believe that a bunch of monkeys would just see a bunch of worthless (for them) washers and immediately come up with the exact same concept. "Hey, we'll use these as tokens whose value is dictated by supply and demand." Nope, sorry, it's just not going to happen.

Well, TFA does state that the monkeys were trained to use the washers as currency.

It took a Great Depression to finally decouple money from an intrinsic value in precious metals, and some people _still_ can't really wrap their mind

sorry to break your party but EVERYTHING you know and do as a human comes from the TRAINING you received... a school for humans works on the same basic principles as a school for dogs, gorillas, etc.. the only diff is that humans seem to have a way better capacity to assimilate that training.. or it's just that the methods are better suited for them.

Sorry to break it to you, but if all that school left you with is a bunch of pavlovian reflexes, like a school for dogs would, then you probably shouldn't be

You are. You assume you know that animals can't reason or think about things and apply them differently. Do you really for a moment think the researchers trained the monkeys to be prostitutes for the washers/money? No thats an instance of the monkey's reasoning and thinking about new and other ways to garner their sweets. Is the ability of the monkey's to reason and think about the training as sophisticated as our ability? probably not, but it seems like it should be judged o

You've hit on something that I've been pondering for a while...I've been thinking that one of the qualifications for 'sentience' needs to be "willfully and knowingly acts in opposition to instinct or trained behavior". The problem with that, I realize, is how do you know that it's willful and not also just part of some other training...

The difference basically is that you also have the intellect to understand _why_ something is done, _when_ it's done, and when _not_ to do it. It's not just stimulus-reaction reflexes based on pure association. You have the mental power to realize when an existing reflex is stupid, and force yourself to stop or develop a better one.

I think you'd be surprised to realize just how much like the rest of the apes we really are. Do you actually think this "intellect" is inherent to being human? It's not; it's "t

Just because we're genetically similar does not mean we have the same cognitive abilities. Which makes the fact that traders behave like monkeys so much more interesting.

For a nice expose on the myths of animal "training", take a look at "Do Animals Think?" by Clive Wynne (Easy search on Amazon). In a nutshell, there is no conclusive evidence that animals can "learn" beyond what is required for their natural environment. There is a big difference between Snake! Everyone watch out! and Hmm, I see a danger

Koko the signing gorilla has been pretty well debunked. Actual fluent speakers of ASL couldn't understand a word she was "saying," and outside evaluators could never manage to verify the huge vocabulary that Penny Patterson claimed she had, only a much more limited one (I think something like 100-150 words instead of 1000+). Chimps and gorillas *can* learn to use various symbols as a vocabulary, but they cannot understand grammar. To them, "me eat banana" and "banana eat me" and "me me banana eat banana me" all mean the same thing.

First, monkeys are not a subset of apes. Monkeys and apes are different subsets of primates. Of the two, apes, not monkeys, are most closely related to humans (and of apes, chimpanzees are most closely related to humans.)

He seems to be popularizing a lot of research, but it's the type of thing many of us do naturally. For me, chasing down hidden indicators is pretty much par for the course. I live in San Francisco, and the city is so routinely out of whack, corrupt, negligent, etc., that I practically maintain my own data warehouse of performance data.His "surprising facts" were not that surprising. The fact that many crack dealers live with their mothers? That's a no-brainer. Mom doesn't have a criminal record, so mom